If you’re a fan of cozy farming sims, and you’re looking for the next escape-from-reality gameplay loop to suck you in, allow me to throw out a curveball: Mr Farmboy. 

Mr Farmboy is what you’d get if you took a cozy farming sim, like Stardew Valley or Fields of Mistria, and removed all of the more irritating elements. The emphasis here is on farming, and farming alone, and everything that could even possibly be annoying in a farming sim is blissfully missing. 

Farm your way to riches

If Stardew Valley and Cities Skylines got together, fell in love, and had a baby, that child would grow and mature into Mr Farmboy. It’s part cozy farming sim, part city builder, and utterly enjoyable. 

Rather than leaving your old life behind, ending up on a derelict farm, and having to build it back up from scratch, Mr Farmboy throws you onto an island and says, “Well, what now?” You’re free to do whatever you want with this island, but your main task is farming and selling that produce at the market. 

Unlike your standard farming sim, you don’t need to buy seeds to sow your crops in Mr Farmboy. As long as you have enough money, you can plant as many of each crop as you like. New crops are unlocked by growing and selling a certain amount of the previous crop, in a way that works like upgrades, and each earned crop sells for more than the previous one. 

You can also hire farmers, harvesters, and couriers to automate the whole plant-harvest-selling loop, which makes things a whole lot easier. Admittedly, they are pretty slow at their tasks, but every little helps. With enough workers on your farm, Mr Farmboy essentially becomes a cozy idler, passively gathering money in the background.

The annoyances are missing

I’ve played a lot of farming sims, to the extent that I’ve become known as a ‘cozy guru’ in some circles, but all of them share some features that end up being irritating. Maintaining friendships, the energy system, and having to upgrade your tools to gather certain items both spring to mind, here, but they’re missing in Mr Farmboy. 

In Mr Farmboy, you don’t even need to select your tools. If you click on a tree, you’ll chop it. If you click on a rock, you’ll mine it. There is nothing you cannot remove from the island as soon as you arrive, so nothing is blocking you from building anywhere or changing the look of the entire plot of land. 

Friendships simply don’t exist, because you are one man and your island. Your sole responsibility is planting and selling crops to make more money and, honestly, that turns this farming escapade into a dream. Sure, being sociable is nice, but sometimes it’s better to keep to yourself and talk to nobody.

But perhaps the best part of Mr Farmboy is the energy system, or lack thereof. There just isn’t one. You can do as much or as little as you like with zero consequences; you don’t need to eat, and there is no need to sleep. The days automatically progress within seconds, and your crops grow within minutes, even the ones that take multiple days to sprout. 

Endless possibilities

Like I said, the entire island can be terraformed with grass, cropland, sand, and roads. Your only necessary task is to build bridges and connect them to the market, allowing customers to come and purchase your crops, but outside of that… The possibilities are endless and you can lay things out however you want. 

If you want to plant crops over the entire island, you can. If you want a beach farm, you can do that too by turning the majority of the land into sand. The only part that can’t be changed is a small plateau where you can buy animals and hire workers for your farm. 

While the island can initially feel small and limiting, the power to change almost everything about it without the need to upgrade anything to make that happen is enough to give you a surprising feeling of power. You can let your creativity flow and make the place your own.

Mr Farmboy is currently under development by Mrdboy, although it doesn’t have a definitive release date yet. However, there is a demo that’s available to play, and, given how much creativity you can throw at each attempt to perfect your farm, the demo alone is endlessly replayable while we wait for the full release.